Critics of Aristotle’s views on politics and governance

#aristotle ’s views on politics and #governance can be summed up in a few sentences: depending on the number of rulers (one, a few, everybody), political systems for the #commongood can be classified into monarchies, aristocracies, and polities. When rulers abuse their power, those three systems shall be named tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. In order to prevent abuse of power, Aristotle advised to distribute power amongst the monarch, the aristocracy, and the people. The two paragraphs above summarise the very best Ancient Greek ideas in the area of politics and governance. Those ideas have exerted influence on Western #civilisation for hundreds of years. Still today, they continue to shape our views on how to govern society. Aristotle’s ideas have undergone attacks from many fronts, but before presenting those attacks, it is important to mention that Aristotle’s ideas constitute an elaboration of the criticisms against democracy raised by his predecessor #socrates (469-399 BC). Socrates never wrote any treatises, but we know of his ideas on politics and government through the writings of #plato (428-348 BC) and Xenophon (435-354 BC). Socrates was a sharp critic of Athenian democracy. He expected governance and politics to be guided by knowledge, wisdom, and moral virtue. Reality proved deeply disappointing because Athenian democracy was often guided by foolishness and emotions of all sorts. He was critical of Athenian democracy because it relied too much on rhetoric. Minorities suffered from the prejudice and mistakes of the majority, and the system did not offer them any possibility of redress. Socrates was against majority rule (democracy) because it only takes one skilful speaker to manipulate people’s emotions and make citizens vote against the common good. Here is the link to the original article: https://johnvespasian.com/critics-of-aristotles-views-on-politics-and-governance/